“Oh yes; and perhaps that poor man was here, praying with the rest, when it happened.  How strange it must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always!  They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them.  That is the way!”

It seemed to Lanfear once more that she was on the verge of the knowledge so long kept from her.  But she went confidently on like a sleepwalker who saves himself from dangers that would be death to him in waking.  She spoke of the earthquake as if she had been reading or hearing of it; but he doubted if, with her broken memory, this could be so.  It was rather as if she was exploring his own mind in the way of which he had more than once been sensible, and making use of his memory.  From time to time she spoke of remembering, but he knew that this was as the blind speak of seeing.

He was anxious to get away, and at last they came out to where they had left the peasant girl waiting beside her donkey.  She was not there, and after trying this way and that in the tangle of alleys, Lanfear decided to take the thoroughfare which they had come up by and trust to the chance of finding her at its foot.  But he failed even of his search for the street:  he came out again and again at the point he had started from.

“What is the matter?” she asked at the annoyance he could not keep out of his face.

He laughed.  “Oh, merely that we’re lost.  But we will wait here till that girl chooses to come back for us.  Only it’s getting late, and Mr. Gerald—­”

“Why, I know the way down,” she said, and started quickly in a direction which, as they kept it, he recognized as the route by which he had emerged from the town the day before.  He had once more the sense of his memory being used by her, as if being blind, she had taken his hand for guidance, or as if being herself disabled from writing, she had directed a pen in his grasp to form the words she desired to put down.  In some mystical sort the effect was hers, but the means was his.

They found the girl waiting with the donkey by the roadside beyond the last house.  She explained that, not being able to follow them into the church with her donkey, she had decided to come where they found her and wait for them there.

“Does no one at all live here?” Lanfear asked, carelessly.

“Among the owls and the spectres?  I would not pass a night here for a lemonade!  My mother,” she went on, with a natural pride in the event, “was lost in the earthquake.  They found her with me before her breast, and her arms stretched out keeping the stones away.”  She vividly dramatized the fact.  “I was alive, but she was dead.”

“Tell her,” Miss Gerald said, “that my mother is dead, too.”

“Ah, poor little thing!” the girl said, when the message was delivered, and she put her beast in motion, chattering gayly to Miss Gerald in the bond of their common orphanhood.